Review of Economic pluralism , edited by Robert Garnett , Erik Olsen , and Martha Starr . London : Routledge , 2009 , 336 pp . I RENE

This volume brings together in twenty accessible chapters a large number of authors contributing previously unpublished work on economic pluralism. The editors present it as the collection of economic pluralism for the twenty first century. This sounds very ambitious but the table of contents is promising, because it reflects pluralism in themes and approaches as well as diversity in authors' geographical origin and gender. In this review, I will try to assess to what extent the contents of the book also reflect this wide diversity. The introduction to the volume by the three editors distinguishes first-wave and second-wave pluralists. Garnett, Olsen, and Starr characterize first-wave pluralists in terms of paradigmatic self-sufficiency, striving for an " analytically unified and self-contained school of thought whose practitioners need not engage in scholarly dialogue beyond the boundaries of their own tradition " (p. 4). Second-wave pluralists, in contrast, aspire to a pluralism derived from John Stuart Mill's arguments against the tyranny of the majority in On liberty; as the editors put it, " a positive valuing of a diversity of views in the minimal sense that one who is so committed would not want to reduce the number of available narratives or views " (p. 4.). This is formulated more simply by Tony Lawson in chapter seven, as " the affirmation, acceptance, and encouragement of diversity " (p. 99). Economic pluralism presents an overview of second-wave pluralism in three parts. The first set of chapters discusses the philosophical realms of epistemology, ontology, and methodology, whereas the second set of chapters goes on to real-world economies, and the third part discusses economics education. The first chapter, written by Fred Lee, makes the case for second-wave pluralism by showing how different schools of thought have engaged with each other recently. He provides an insightful table with examples of publications at the cross roads of different heterodox traditions, such as post Keynesianism and feminist economics, or